Meta

Prisoners of Context

Even very smart people can be blinded by the context of their environment. To most senior software execs, they are living in a tough environment of long sales cycles, even longer implementation cycles, impossible to non-existent upgrade capability and a 3-5x services budget to implement their license software. And they are right – that market is DEAD!!!! Customers don’t want that anymore.

What they are not realizing is that the new opportunity is exactly to sell and make software in a manner that has shorter sales cycles, very fast implementation time-lines, easy to upgrade and easy to maintain software, and a small amount of services. The new software companies will do exactly that and they will eat the legacy players alive as history has shown many times.

Venky adds in another post (about IBM): “The core ERP market has both the wrong software delivery model (behind the firewall, long implementation cycle, huge customization) as well as the wrong business strategy of trying to sell big bang enterprise licenses. Both of which are not how consumers want to buy software…I think the future comprises of composite apps built by combining web services and IBM should focus on building the infrastructure that powers that future. ”